#001: The Broadway Melody
THE BROADWAY MELODY Release Date February 1, 1929 ( Grauman's Chinese Theatre ) February 8, 1929 ( NYC ) June 12, 1929 ( US ) History This was the first all-talking musical ever made. There were musicals that were partial sound films; The Jazz Singer (1927) , for example, is a musical but is mostly a silent film besides the singing sequences. In the documentary That's Entertainment (1974), Frank Sinatra credits The Hollywood Revue (1929) as "the first all talking, all singing, all dancing" movie but he had his dates wrong by a few months. Perhaps the producers of That's Entertainment were afraid of questioning Old Blue Eyes in case he decided to have them swimming with the fishes? Broadway Melody was produced for two forms of projection: Sound on Film, where the sound is read off of the film as it ran through the projector (and eventually became the industry standard for 80 years), and Sound on Disc, which was another stand...